Tennis Briefing: Shanghai and Wuhan tournaments bring break points and breakthroughs

Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.

This week, the headline tournaments were Shanghai and Wuhan. Elsewhere, Rafael Nadal’s retirement overshadowed another top player’s departure, a sister act took to the court, and an all-Chinese semifinal capped a great swing for the nation.

For all the budding teenage players out there feeling like they will always be behind the alpha dogs among their contemporaries, the Richard Gasquet experience should offer some consolation and an object lesson — do not, under any circumstances, peak at 14.

For those not familiar with the tennis torture that Gasquet, the 38-year-old Frenchman, has endured over the past two decades, he was “the guy” when he was a young teenager. There was another player born two weeks before him named Rafael Nadal, who looked like he might be pretty good, but Gasquet was the guy dominating the chatter and gracing magazine covers.

Then they turned professional. Nadal won 22 Grand Slam titles, Gasquet zero, reaching three major semifinals. Their career head-to-head will end 18-0 in Nadal’s favor.

Last week brought another indignity. On Thursday, Gasquet announced that he will retire from tennis at the 2025 French Open. Thursday just happened to be the day that Nadal announced his own retirement, with his career finishing at the Davis Cup this November. That garnered a few more headlines, even in L’Equipe, the French publication where Gasquet revealed his retirement plans.

Gasquet has had a lovely career. He has won more than 600 matches and collected more than $20million in prize money, playing all the while with a lusty one-handed backhand which remains one of the most thrilling shots in the sport.

He still ended up being the Wile E. Coyote to Nadal’s Road Runner, right to the end.

“It’s not like we’re nervous, it’s like we’re nervous about each other,” Mirra Andreeva said in a news conference ahead of her second-round match in Wuhan — against her sister, Erika.

Mirra, 17, is three years younger than Erika and is ranked 48 places above her in the WTA rankings, but Erika eased past her younger sister 6-3, 6-1 in China. It was the sisters’ first meeting on the WTA Tour, but unlike almost every other first meeting in tennis, Erika and Mirra didn’t have to worry about doing any research on their opponent. They know each other so well that the patterns of play and tactics are completely secondary to the psychological battle — or, as Mirra puts it, the psychological concern they have for the other.

“If she does a lot of mistakes or I see she’s unhappy or worried, I start to be worried for her. Then I cannot play normally. When she sees that some bad stuff happens to me, she cannot play normally,” Mirra said.

Mirra led 3-1 in a first set that took 52 minutes for nine games, losing her way at 40-40 on her serve after a cat-and-mouse point in which, despite having the initiative, she chose to play a ball back towards her sister instead of into open court. Erika then broke Mirra’s serve three consecutive times to win the set, Mirra blasting a ball out of the court in frustration.

In her news conference after the match, Erika said she too was aware of this dynamic. “I know where she will most possibly go, and she as well,” she said.

“Sometimes during the rally, I was like, ‘Normally I go there, but I know that she knows that I go there’, and I changed my decision,” she added, before reflecting more widely on the occasion.

“First experience and both of us were happy it happened at a big tournament, but I’m not sure we enjoyed it,” she said.

Having been ranked world No. 100 at the end of July, Belgian David Goffin has climbed to just outside the world’s top 50. In his last three tournaments, he has reached the semifinals of the Winston-Salem Open, the third round of the U.S. Open, and the quarterfinals of the Shanghai Masters, beating the world No. 3 Alexander Zverev in the process in China. Overall, it’s been a welcome return to form for Goffin, 33, a popular former world No. 7 and gifted shotmaker.

In Shanghai, his success was based in part on the small margins of fending off numerous break points. He saved three out of four in the first round against James Duckworth, a remarkable 11 out of 15 against Lorenzo Musetti, five out of eight against Marcos Giron, and then five out of seven in that win against Zverev. Goffin’s serve has always come under pressure, in part because of his diminutive 5ft 11in (180cm) frame.

To maintain his current momentum, Goffin will need to keep playing break points as well as he did in Shanghai.

Someone perceived as not playing break points especially well last week was Carlos Alcaraz, who took just one of his eight chances in a disappointing straight-sets loss to Tomas Machac, who took two of his four. The defeat confirmed Alcaraz’s rival Jannik Sinner as the year-end world No. 1 and Sinner is top of the ATP Tour’s ‘under pressure’ rating, which incorporates a combination of break and set points, along with a player’s performance in final-set tiebreaks.

Alcaraz is seventh in that ranking, but he has a marginally better break-point conversion figure for the year than Sinner — 42.0 percent compared to 41.3 percent. Break point statistics, while useful for taking the general temperature of a match, are not always reflective of the whole story. Break point distribution — how evenly spread opportunities are across a match — is a more useful way of examining a player’s performance on return, but has not been adopted across tennis as yet.

For all players, whether it’s Sinner, Alcaraz or Goffin, the small margins make a big difference.

At the start of the Shanghai Masters, the exciting group of Chinese male players starting to emerge were all in promising positions — reflecting the view in the country that they might finally be catching up to the more successful women.

The week or so since then has offered a reminder of how far they have to go because Chinese women are continuing to set very high standards. The Olympic gold medallist and Australian Open finalist Zheng Qinwen was once again the headline act last week, reaching the Wuhan Open final and pushing Aryna Sabalenka to a third set in a match far closer than their other meetings this year, in Melbourne and at the U.S. Open.

To reach the final, Zheng won the first-ever all-Chinese WTA 1000 semifinal against Wang Xinyu, who is now up to No. 39 in the rankings, meaning China have two players in the world’s top 40.

Zheng, ranked No. 7, is in a good position to qualify for the year-end WTA Finals in Saudi Arabia and last week also became the first athlete to ever be featured on the cover of Vogue China. Her and Wang’s run in Wuhan continued a very successful Asian swing for both the Chinese men and women, even if Shanghai wasn’t quite as successful for the men as Beijing, Chengdu and Hangzhou had been (where a home player reached the semifinals or better at all three).

It looks as though 2025 will be a big year for China as a tennis nation, which led by Zheng is gradually starting to fulfil some of its huge potential.

The first is the best passing shot from Novak Djokovic, but it’s only one of three.

🎾 ATP: 

🏆 Jannik Sinner (1) def. Novak Djokovic (4) 7-6(4), 6-3 to win the Shanghai Masters (1000) in Shanghai. It is Sinner’s seventh title of 2024.

🎾 WTA:

🏆 Aryna Sabalenka (1) def. Zheng Qinwen (5) 6-3, 5-7, 6-3 to win the Wuhan Open (1000) in Wuhan, China. It is Sabalenka’s fourth title of 2024.

📈 Coco Gauff swaps places with Jessica Pegula and returns to world No. 3.

📈 Tomas Machac ascends eight spots from No. 33 to No. 25, a new career high for the Czech.

📈 Hailey Baptiste moves up 22 places from No. 102 to No. 80, a new career high for the American.

📉 Hubert Hurkacz falls four places from No. 8 to No. 12, after dropping the points from his 2023 Shanghai Masters title.

📉 Ons Jabeur falls four places from No. 29 to No. 33 after curtailing her season due to a shoulder injury. She would not be initially seeded for the Australian Open.

📉 Fabian Marozsan drops out of the top 50, falling from No. 48 to No. 57.

🎾 ATP 

📍Almaty, Kazakhstan: Almaty Open (250) featuring Frances Tiafoe, Tomas Machac, Zhang Zhizhen, Francisco Cerundolo.